The Platform Series

From solo performances to University music groups, baroque to contemporary, we are pleased to continue our platform for the community at the Department of Music to share their world-class talents. 

For this edition of The Platform, we welcome doctoral student and pianist, April Wu, for this late-afternoon performance of C.P.E Bach, Schubert, Chopin and Scriabin.  

About the programme

In this recital, musicologist and pianist April Wu traces a line of restlessness through two centuries of keyboard writing. The programme opens, in trance-like improvisation, with C.P.E. Bach’s Fantasia in F# minor (1787). Its sudden switches in harmony, texture, and timbre enact sound’s capacity to mutate and disorient, yet without relinquishing a sense of order. Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D.784 (1823), written in the shadow of the composer’s illness, presages the haunting soundworld of his last three sonatas. Bells permeate the sparse texture of the opening Allegro: stern amidst a funeral procession, briefly soothing in a smaller, resonant interior. The Andante opens with the calmest arch-shaped melody, whose unfolding is disrupted by menacing ppp interjections. The melody then migrates to the tenor voice, enveloped in a shimmering string quartet texture. The closing Allegro vivace pulses with nervous energy, with its relentless triplet ascents and ferocious arpeggios, yielding temporarily, in characteristic Schubertian fashion, to glowing, lyrical interludes.

After the interval, Chopin’s Nocturne in F# minor, Op.48 No.2 (1841) descends into rumination. The melodic line is pure bel canto, at once fragile and inexhaustible. A youthful Scriabin, still Romantic in idiom but already reaching toward something more volatile, closes the programme that moves from withdrawal to ignition. The first of his Two Impromptus, Op.12 (1895) colours the dreamscape in more esoteric light; the second offers an ardent singing line that, in the final page, burns through its own material.

About the performer

April Wu is a final-year PhD student in Music and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in the fruitful exchange between listening and thinking, particularly in relation to the long 19th century. Her PhD project focuses on voice’s slippery ontology and the complex mediation between sounding and listening bodies in the early Romantic Lied. She has presented papers at the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group Annual Conference, the London Conference for Critical Philosophy, the Society for European Philosophy Annual Conference, and Schubert Research Center in Vienna. She is the editor of The Schubertian, the journal of Schubert Institute UK.

Car parking

When you arrive for a College event at our Egham campus, please park in car parks 12 or 4.

Car park 12 can be accessed by turning right as you enter the main College gates and is located next to the tennis courts. If this car park is full, please drive further onto our campus to car park 4, which can be accessed by turning left at the mini-roundabout behind the Students’ Union. We would advise that you bring the College map to campus with you and give yourself plenty of time to park.

Blue Badge holders can find designated parking spaces in Car park 1W, as well as between Gardeners Lodge and the Williams Annexe. You can find these locations by looking at our campus map opposite. If you require any assistance on arrival, please contact our premises team in advance of your visit by emailing: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk and they will be happy to help.

Please note that we operate an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system on certain parts of our campus, however if you are here for an organised event, parking is unrestricted for event guests in car parks 12, 4 or 14 (or display your blue badge permit if parking in a disabled bay). If you have any questions about parking, please email: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk